Posts in Category: pc hardware

So, although the graphics cards have been out for a while now (although still a little hard to get hold of), the games with RTX support haven’t really been there. So now that some games are coming out with shiny RTX options, we’re going to take a look at performance and ask what on earth RTX is actually used for!

Your computer has faithfully been by your side for all these years. You can’t replace it (for whatever reason), but with Christmas coming up, you decide it’s time to give your little friend a much-deserved gift.

Or maybe it’s frustrating you with sluggishness. Either way, you’ve got a great excuse to give it a little performance boost. What I’m here to do is to help you figure out what you can do to upgrade your older system on a budget.

This list is more suited to people who fit the following:

You focus on gaming or productivity tasks

You might use these components in another computer build

It is okay if the above doesn’t quite apply to you. This info can still be really helpful. Just keep in mind that you might have different upgrade options than listed.

Choosing RAM can be daunting, because this decision may have a tangible impact on your user experience. How many browser tabs can you keep open, how many layers can you have open in Photoshop, and how fast will your game load? All of this is directly affected by your choice of RAM.

The market for PC components has been a wild ride in recent years. With the cryptocurrency craze driving component prices through the roof throughout most of 2017 and 2018, PC building took a hit and left enthusiasts seriously considering prebuilts (shudder).

But the crypto bubble has popped and other market influences are pushing prices down – for now. Prices for GPUs, the core components gobbled up by cryptocurrency miners, have generally come back down to MSRP, and after a supply shortage that drove up prices, RAM is finally sinking to around 2016 levels. Add to that a diverse market of storage options (HDD, SSD and the newer M.2 drives), as well as other supply improvements that are driving down prices, and you have significantly reduced costs for building a PC.

How long will it last? The latest generation of high-end Nvidia GPUs might be experiencing a string of card failures and low supply is nudging prices up. Meanwhile, US tariffs are pushing some manufacturers to raise prices. The time might be right to start building a PC—or begin looking for an upgrade.

We’ve put together a list of some PC components that provide great value going into the holiday season:

AMD are coming out swinging, and they’re out for Intel’s blood with the flagship Threadripper 2990WX! With a bonkers 32 cores and 64 threads, this is not a CPU for the casual gamer; it’s a workstation powerhouse, designed for when multi-core performance is king.

In the big wide world of hard drives, SSDs, and fancy CPU tech, we felt it was about time to have a bit of a dive into data transfer rates so you know exactly what kind of speed and overall bandwidth you’re getting for your money!

April brought us the official release of the full range of 8th-Gen Intel CPUs, including the i3-8300T. As such, it seems only right that we take a look at what we can build with this power-efficient CPU!